“Be Creative, Be Friends and Share Cultural Experiences”: Genre, Politics, and Fun at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest

Abstract

This article examines children’s political agency in the context of the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. The Eurovision Song Contest is widely recognized as a political arena—a space for nation branding and soft diplomacy, narratives of European musical and democratic harmony, and protests over global political events. But despite filling similar roles to their adult counterparts, the young performers’ age and the organizers’ emphasis on ensuring the event is safe and fun mean these dynamics are frequently downplayed or overlooked at Junior Eurovision, with significant consequences for how we understand children’s political and politicized roles in international cultural spaces. I work with Lauren Berlant’s concepts of genre and the juxtapolitical to argue that recognition of children’s political—as opposed to artistic—agency by adults is tempered by both the format of Eurovision as entertainment and by broader conceptions apparent in international discourses of children as apolitical innocents. I suggest that while each of these genres can work separately to quiet the political dimensions of events, issues, and identities, it is Junior Eurovision’s double-edged status as a spectacular musical event and one starring and aimed at children that keeps the young performers from being recognized as having political identities and agency twice over.